Four years ago I started using Goodreads to maintain
the list of books I've read (which had lived in a flat text file for a
decade+ before that).

Now it's been aquired by Amazon. I doubt it will survive in its current
form for more than 2 years. Anyway, while Goodreads has been a quite good
way to find what my friends are reading, I've been increasingly annoyed by
the quality of its recommendations, and its paucity of other features I
need. It really doesn't seem to help me keep up with new and interesting
fiction at all, unless my friends happen to read it.

So I looked at LibraryThing. Actually, I seem to have looked at it several
times before, since it had accounts named "joey", "joeyh", and "joeyhess"
that were all mine. Which is what happens to me on sites that lack Openid
or Browserid.

Digging a little deeper this time, I am finding its recommendations much
better than Goodreads' -- although it seems to sometimes recommend
books I've already read. And it has some nice features like tracking
series, so you can easily tell when you've read all the books in a series
or not. The analytics overall seem quite impressive. The UI is cluttered
and it seems to take 5 clicks to add and rate a single book. It supports
half stars.

Overall I get the feeling this was designed for a set of needs that doesn't
quite match mine. For example, it seems it doesn't have a single database
entry per book; instead each time I add a book, it seems to pull in data
from primary sources (library of congress, Amazon cough) and treat this
as a separate (but related) entry somehow. Weird. Perhaps this makes sense
to say, librarians. I'm willing to adjust how I think about things if
there's an underlying reason that can be grasped.

Don't say we should open-source the code. That would be a nightmare! And
I have limited confidence in APIs. LibraryThing has the book geeks, but
not so much the computers geeks.

I assume that the nightmare is that there would be dozens of clones of
the site, all balkanized, with no data transfer, no federation between
them.

Except, that's the current situation, as every Goodreads user who is
now trying to use LibraryThing is discovering.

Before I ever started using Goodreads, I made sure
it met my minimum criteria for putting my data into a proprietary silo:
That I could get the data back out. I can, and have. LibraryThing can
import it. But the import process loses data! And it's majorly clunky.
If I want to continue using Goodreads due to its better UI, and get the
data into LibraryThing, for its better analytics, I have to do
periodic dumps and loads of CSV files with manual fixups.

This is why we have standards. This is why we're building federated social
networks like status.net and the upcoming pump.io that can pass structured
data between nodes transparently. It doesn't have to be a nightmare. It
doesn't have to rely on proprietary APIs. We have the computer geeks.

Thing is, sites like GoodReads and LibraryThing need domain-specific
knowledge, and communities to curate data, and stuff like that. Things
that work well in a smallish company. (LibraryThing even has a business
model that makes sense, yearly payments to store more books in it.)

With free software, it's much more appealing to sink the time we have into
the most general-purpose solution we can. Why build a LibraryThing when we
could build something that tracks not only books but movies and music? Why
build that when we could build a generic federated network for structured
social data? And that's great, as infrastructure, but if that
infrastructure is only used to build a succession of proprietary data
silos, what was the point?

So, could some computer & book geeks please build a free software
alternative to these things, focused on books, that federates using any of
the fine APIs we have available? Bear in mind that there is already a nice
start at a comprehensive collection of book data in the
Open Library. I'd happily contribute to a crowd
funded project doing this.